Originally Posted by Banshee365

Well done on the trans R&R jaaa. That's not an easy job for anyone to do by themselves. If you were having a big leak from the converter seal you really have to replace the seal AND converter. The sealing surface on the converter is usually grooved and will forever leak with a new seal. The input seal is also pretty fun to replace with the pump in the trans as the input shaft is stuck through it. You have to get creative with pulling the seal out and be very careful not the mar any of the soft aluminum on the pump. Personally, if I were to replace the seal on a known good trans, I would remove the pump and disassemble it to drive the seal out from the rear. I could do that much faster than replacing the seal as it sits in the trans all together.

That is interesting about the bearings. Those bearings are very very hard. I haven ever seen them damaged. You would almost have to run it in a lack of fluid situation for a while. How far down into the case did you go and which bearing(s) did you find burnt?

Originally Posted by jaaa

Looks like I made a good call then on not trying to replace that seal. I went online and found a couple people who had attempted this repair- with both of them being unsuccessful. I went to a couple transmission shops and they wanted $1500 just for the rebuild. I was losing a saucer plate sized spot of oil on the ground every time I drove it, so it had to be fixed. And yes, this was the biggest job I've ever done on my driveway. I once pulled the back end of a transfer case off and repaired a leak on my suv, but this was much harder. As to the bearing(and to be truthfull-I'm not sure it was a bearing-it's been a year and a half now) I remember it was on just the other side past the torque converter. I remember seeing a blueish color that to me looked like it had been overheated.
Late edit: here is a picture from your tutorial where I saw much worse of a scorched blue color